Cathartes Aura

Keeping vigil with what is

In my neighborhood on the edge of town, we feel winter loosen when the jeweled snow slops into mud and the wind harasses the pregnant cattle. But we know it is finally spring when the turkey vultures return to roost in the bare branches of our cottonwood trees.

Thirty or more of them spread out along the block from Father Dan’s carport on the corner to Joanne’s silver poplar across from me. The heavy birds perch as high as they can. In the morning, as the sun comes up, they spread the cross beam of their wings, backs to the east, loosing the cold out of their feathers.

They have no comeliness that we should be drawn to them — their red bald heads, their big nostrils, their dark feathers sheltering parasites. They cover their weak feet in their own excrement. Their common name means to pluck out and tear away. They live by nuzzling into what the rest of us cannot stomach: death, rot, decay.

Further across the valley along Hermit Road, big-bodied birds of prey watch from power poles. Hawks and owls and sometimes even eagles shine against our sky. We thrill to see them dive after some unsuspecting pulse. Heads helmeted in feathers, breasts unmoved by wind, they snatch and rip into a pulpy heart without ever touching ground. These are the strengths and graces we usually admire. Predators.

The sky is buoyant if you know what to look for, and vultures know where to look. They might soar six hours at the edge of the jet stream without ever flapping a wing. The heat rising off the broken earth holds them up, a merry-go-round in the sky. From there they look and watch, smell changes in the wind, surrender to what is unseen.

Vultures don’t hunt. They don’t stalk or grab or kill. Their daily work is to witness. Then to clean up the mess death has left. Prairie dogs decapitated by mowing machines, trout at the edge of evaporating ponds, an old deer strangled in a barbed wire fence, a sparrow that has fallen.

That naked head, that sharp curved beak expose a vulture’s astonishing sense of smell. It’s not their eyes alone that watch for death; vultures must wait to breathe it in. Some aroma of souls, shaken from limp flesh, greets them in the air. Only then do they drop to the ground, wings closing in benediction. At the abandoned skins, they bow and rock, filling their mouths with the feast left of a life. They enfold these decaying forms into their own form, taking guts into their own gut. And when the bones are stripped clean, they heft that consumed body aloft, a gesture of some kind of repair.

At dusk vultures recollect on bare branches. Shoulder to shoulder, they make no sound, reverencing the actual conditions, keeping vigil with what is.

Cathartes Aura, the turkey vulture’s Latin name, literally means “purifying breeze.” Their arrivals and departures, like fresh currents of grief, cleanse what can never be healed, keep death from rotting into stagnant disease.

From a distance they look black and threatening, big as any bird of prey. But I have gotten close enough to see one in the sun. I have found a wing feather dropped into my garden. And I know this creature is not black at all. Its body is a rich earthy brown. And the undersides of its open wings are edged with silver flames.

Turkey Vulture in flightPhoto by Michael Baird on Unsplash